The present invention relates to illuminators and more particularly to illuminators for medical equipment, specifically to intra-oral dental equipment.
The common type of illuminator is the projector-type, wherein a light bulb is mounted on a moveable arm, which is affixed at one end to a base or a stationary surface. Such an illuminator, while being simple and effective for general use, is not suitable for illuminating specific body areas of a medically treated patient. This is so, since such an illuminator is stationarily located behind the person administering the treatment and the hand manipulating a tool is disposed between the light beam and the treated area, thus shadowing the area. While this situation could be remedied by constantly moving the arm of the illuminator to change the angle of the light beam, obviously this is very irritating during treatment, not to mention destructive and medically undesirable.
With a view to overcome the drawbacks of this basic type of an illuminator, there were devised other types of illuminators such as, small illuminators attached to the eyeglasses or head of the person administering the treatment or a light-converging reflecting mirror attached to the head of the person administering the treatment, reflecting light emanating from a source in front of the person administering the treatment. These solutions suffer from various disadvantages including the inaccuracy of the light beam which is supposed, at all times, to focus on and illuminate the treated area, namely, the necessity of the head of the person administering the treatment to be stationarily disposed at a certain angle with respect to the treated area during treatment, which, to say the least, is very awkward to the person administering the treatment.
Finally, there exist various medical instruments such as e.g., laryngoscopes, which are equipped with built-in illuminators, however, these instruments are expensive and intended for very long term use and not all of such instruments can be properly disinfected in autoclaves in their entirety, as actually required.